The Creepy, Beautiful "Blood Book" Made By A Scrapbooking Victorian Gentleman

The Creepy, Beautiful "Blood Book" Made By A Scrapbooking Victorian Gentleman

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The decoupaged pages of this scrapbook are covered with carefully cut-out engravings, quotations from Scripture, and religious exhortations. Each page has been finished with red India ink, painted in droplets so that the engravings appear to be dripping blood. (Hence, the colloquial nickname for the volume: "The Blood Book.") The writer Evelyn Waugh, who collected Victoriana, bought this book to add to his library around 1950. It survives for our examination because it’s been preserved, along with the rest of Waugh’s papers and books, at the Harry Ransom Center.

The inscription at the beginning of the book, from John Bingley Garland to his daughter Amy on September 1, 1854, reads as follows: “A legacy left in his lifetime for her future examination by her affectionate father.” As the Ransom Center’s Richard Oram writes in his post about the book, a year after this dedication Amy was married, so it seems that this book may have been a betrothal present from a father to his daughter.

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Oram notes that scrapbooking, while a common nineteenth-century pastime, was traditionally done by women, and usually served a function of collecting newspaper clippings. (See, for example, these pages from Susan B. Anthony’s scrapbook, which used cut-and-paste assembly to comment upon the news.) Garland’s project, which contextual clues indicate was assembled by the father himself, was unusual in its male authorship and its use of art. Some of the engravings, of which there are several hundred, appear to be taken from books of the etchings of poet William Blake.